Arabic and Latin Cultures as Resources for the Hebrew Translation Movement

Abstract

Die Geschichte der jüdischen Philosophie ist eine Geschichte von Rezeptionen fremden Gedankenguts. – Julius Guttmann (1933) Most of the scientific and philosophical activity of medieval Jews was in the Greco-Arabic tradition. Jewish scholars in the Islamic world had direct access to the texts of this tradition. By contrast, their co-religionists in Christian Europe, whose cultural language was Hebrew, almost exclusively depended on texts in that language – either translations of works from other languages or works composed in Hebrew by scholars on the basis of their reading in other languages. This dependence on translations of scientific and philosophical works from Arabic or from Latin (only very rarely from vernaculars) distinguishes the Jewish acquisition of science and philosophy in Christian Europe from its earlier phase in the East, when Arabophone Jews absorbed non-Jewish learning directly from the majority culture. The present essay probes the dissimilar attitudes of medieval Judaism toward the two resource cultures on which it drew. Contrary to the case in the Muslim-Arabic setting, in Christian-Latin contexts, Jews took over very little science and philosophy from their immediate environment and did so slowly and hesitatingly (although this varied as a function of the era, discipline, and venue). It is particularly intriguing that the learned Jewish circles in Provence (as medieval Jews referred to the Midi) and (although less so) in Italy, whose cultural tongue was Hebrew and who, beginning in the mid-twelfth century, absorbed “external knowledge” in Hebrew, preferred to rely on Arabic sources imported from the Iberian peninsula rather than turn to the Latin writings of their neighbors. Only in medicine was there a significant absorption of Latin learning into Hebrew. The discomfort with Latin culture did not lessen until the late fourteenth century and only the fifteenth century witnessed the rise in northern Spain of what Mauro Zonta has fittingly dubbed “Hebrew Scholasticism.” In what follows, I try to describe this cluster of related phenomena and shed some light on them.

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